LON-CAPA for Publishing Companies

Although faculty generate the majority of content in the system, the network also hosts commercial content from textbook publishers. In addition to the resources shown in the shared pool, the back-of-the-chapter problems from nearly all major introductory physics textbooks are available in the network. This serves as a large incentive for textbook adoption, particularly at institutions that already use LON-CAPA.

Publishing companies usually pay commercial companies to prepare these homework libraries in LON-CAPA format, to host them, and to selectively make them available to courses using their text. Faculty and students do not pay for this service, instead, the publishers use LON-CAPA-coded libraries as an incentive to adopt their books - a model which is very different from WebAssign , where students directly pay for access to the online homework.
Because LON-CAPA is a distributed network, it is sufficient to have these homework libraries hosted on one server in the network. The institutions using the problems can deploy them from their own servers and integrate them as homework or exam questions into their own courses, while still maintaining full digital property rights management.

Site maintained by Gerd Kortemeyer.Supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF-ITR 0085921, NSF-CCLI-ASA 0243126, and NSF-CCLI 0717790. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Initial funding for CAPA has been provided by the Alfred. P. Sloan Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.